Rebekah Brooks is not on trial because she was a tabloid editor or worked for Rupert Murdoch, the Old Bailey jury has been told as she began giving evidence.

Opening Brooks's defence on the 62nd day of the phone-hacking trial on Thursday her counsel, Jonathan Laidlaw QC, told the jury it was for the prosecution to prove their case and not for her.

In a half-hour opening speech, he told them: "She is not being tried because she was the editor of a tabloid newspaper. Views, we all understand, differ of the tabloid press.

"Neither is she on trial for having worked for Rupert Murdoch's company or for having worked her way up through the organisation.

"She's not being tried for News International's strategy, its policies, its influences or its corporate values.

"Neither is Mrs Brooks on trial for any political views she made hold. Nor is she to be judged for the support her newspapers gave to one party or another."

Brooks, wearing a cream cardigan and a royal blue dress, appeared nervous in the witness box, answering softly to the line of early questions by Laidlaw.

Initially he took her through her childhood. She told the jury she was an only child and that she had lived with her father's father and her mother's mother when she was small.

Her father was a gardener and her mother had been a secretary in an engineering firm.

She said she had been inspired to get in to journalism by her grandmother. "She liked writing and wrote poetry for a local newspaper," said Brooks. "There was no one in my extended family involved in journalism."

Brooks added that her mother had told her that she had wanted to be a journalist as young as eight.

She got her first job on a newspaper at the age of 14 when she was taken on for work experience on the Post, a newspaper owned by Eddie Shah in Warrington.

Later she was given a chance to work in London when Shah launched the paper nationally.

Brooks enjoyed a "rapid rise through the features desk" of the News of the World, the court heard, having joined from the red-top's magazine in 1992, to being made deputy editor of the paper aged 27 in 1995.

Part of Brooks's role on the News of the World features desk was dealing with celebrity publicist Max Clifford, the jury heard. "The News of the World had a very strong relationship with someone called Max Clifford who brokered stories and I dealt with him a lot," she told jurors.

Led by Laidlaw through her early career at the News of the World's Sunday magazine, Brooks described how she once got fired when managers cut back her shifts "but I managed to get back in again".

She was promoted from researcher to features writer at the magazine in July 1989, when she wrote "real life" stories and interview celebrities. Asked whether she was good at this task, Brooks replied: "I kept my job so I must have been alright. I enjoyed doing it."

Brooks told jurors she kept a "mantra in the back of my head" to establish good relationships on the job, adding that if she got on with interviewees and they liked what she had written then "you could make them a contact".In his opening statement, Laidlaw told the jury that Brooks faced three sets of charges – one related to a conspiracy to hack phones, one in relation to a single charge of unlawfully authorising payment to a public official for stories and two charges in relation to allegations she conspired to conceal documents and computers from police investigating phone hacking.

In relation to "count one, the phonehacking charge, the suggestion that she was involved in a conspiracy to unlawfully access voicemail messages", Laidlaw posed the question: "Did she knew about and endorse a practice of phone hacking at the News of the World during her editorship of the News of the World before May 2000 and January 2003?"

Laidlaw went on to outline the other charges, telling the jury that it would take some time to go through as the charges spanned "12 years of her work".

Laidlaw told jurors they might have found the trial hard to follow so far.

He said that "on occasions absolutely critical information was overlooked or left out" by the prosecution.

"If there is a sense of confusion about the evidence and what it is said to relate to, that would be entirely understandable."

He told the jury that at the end of the trial, he would "have a lot more to say" about Brooks's treatment by the prosecution and the police.

Laidlaw told the jury it was not for Brooks to give evidence to "make out her innocence", but that the prosecution must bear the burden of reaching a high standard of proof. He said: "That may not be something that has emerged clearly or at all at this point."